


From a Great Height

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, References to Suicide, Secrets, heights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 17:39:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18348494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: When Jon invites her to Balor's Needle, Thayet shares her secret fears with her husband.





	From a Great Height

**Author's Note:**

> Contains references to suicide so please read with discretion. 
> 
> Written for the Secrets and Lies Week Event as part of the Free for All at Goldenlake.

From a Great Height

“It’s a beautiful May day.” Jon decided after a wearying morning of an endless council meeting to surprise his wife with a suggestion that they take advantage of their midday hour free of responsibilities and droning ministers to picnic together on this splendid, sunny spring afternoon. As he appeared in the parlor doorway with a basket of miniature meat pies, fresh fruit, cheese, and wine slung on one arm and a blanket wrapped around the other, he saw Thayet leaning into the pillows on the couch, hand stretching back to massage her neck. She dropped it as soon as he spoke, her expression that of a child caught pilfering a cake from the kitchens. “I thought we might go on a picnic lunch today.” 

“A picnic lunch.” Thayet gave an almost dreamy smile as Jon crossed to the sofa, stroking the tension from her neck with the hand attached to the arm that held the blanket. “Wherever did you imagine we could go on a picnic today, Jon?” 

“The sky is wonderfully clear today.” Jon tilted his chin toward the window through which they could see an azure sky unmarred by even a single cotton cloud. “From the top of Balor’s Needle, we wouldn’t see all the way to the Southern Desert, but we would feel as if we could. We’d have a bird’s eye view of the world. Everything would seem so peaceful from that unfathomable height.” 

He thought he had painted a serene if not romantic image of this place that made him feel simultaneously small and paradoxically powerful in relation to the world so far below him–this secret refuge that he had never shown his wife–but Thayet jerked out of his grasp, exclaiming with a laugh that bordered on the hysteric, “Balor’s Needle! You couldn’t get me up there for all the love and money in the kingdom!” 

“Because the height would make you sick while you’re carrying our baby?” Jon glanced down at the ever-expanding arch of Thayet’s first pregnancy. It occurred to him that looking down from a dizzying height was likely not what any healer would recommend for a stomach that sometimes seemed to be taxed just by rising in the morning. 

“The height would make me sick at any time.” Thayet’s tone had assumed the sharpness it always did when she believed he was coddling her. His wife wasn’t a woman who appreciated being coddled even while pregnant. She seemed to feel that any comfort he offered her was a perception of her weakness rather than an expression of his love. 

“Are you afraid of falling?” Jon frowned, feeling a furrow form between his eyebrows. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of his wife as afraid of anything, nonetheless so common a thing as falling from a great height. 

“I’m not afraid of falling, but I’m afraid of leaping.” Thayet shook her head, and he had the impression from the faraway, sad look in her eyes that her mind and heart were trapped in the memory of a less pleasant time even as her body remained beside him. “My mother leapt from a tower to protest my father’s policies against the K’miri. I never want to be tempted to do the same.”

“Am I such a terrible husband with such appalling polices that you’d feel compelled to leap from Balor’s Needle in protest?” Jon’s breath snagged around a fish hook that was suddenly piercing into his throat. He knew that he had his rough edges that cut into Thayet’s, scarring them both, but he couldn’t imagine being such a flawed husband that he drove his wife to suicide. 

“You aren’t a terrible husband.” Thayet cupped his beard between her palms, and when she went on in a whisper, he realized she was sharing a secret with him as he had tried to share his secret of Balor’s Needle with her, “It was single-minded stubbornness and insanity that made my mother leap from the tower. I know I inherited her single-minded stubbornness. I don’t want to find out if I inherited her insanity as well.” 

That was the difference between him and Thayet, Jon thought. His father had also fallen–no, he wouldn’t lie in his own head–leapt from a great height to his death, but Jon believed in his bones that his father’s suicide had come from the man’s weaknesses, which he was determined not to inherit, not his strengths. Thayet, on the other hand, believed that her mother’s suicide had been an act of strength and defiance, a strength and defiance she had inherited in overwhelming amount. No wonder she feared the lure suicide could cast upon her.

“We won’t go to Balor’s Needle.” Jon streamed kisses golden as the sunlight streaking through the window into her hair. “We’ll picnic in the rose garden. They have such a short season, we should enjoy them while they last.” 

“We’ll picnic in the rose garden.” A brave smile returned to Thayet’s face as she agreed with Jon’s second suggestion for a romantic picnic location. “It’ll be gorgeous this time of year.”

“It will.” Jon abruptly felt compelled to share a secret about his own mother in exchange for the one Thayet had whispered to him about hers. “The rose garden was planted for my mother, you know. Before that, the palace didn’t have a rose garden. Roses were some of her favorite flowers. She loved to sit on a stone bench and watch them bloom. She could admire their beauty for hours without once getting bored. I remember her every time I walk through the rose garden.” 

“That must make the place even more beautiful to you,” Thayet murmured, standing as he lifted her to her feet with a hand through hers.

“Even more beautiful and more sorrowful.” Jon might have wondered if beauty always came from something sorrowful but he didn’t want this spring day to be tinged with any more melancholy than it already was. “Come on, my dear. Let’s go on our picnic before the council meeting starts again and we haven’t eaten.” 

“Our stomachs might growl in hunger in public.” Thayet gazed at him with the mischief that always made him feel roguish gleaming in her hazel eyes. “The horror.”

“I don’t believe you are taking this seriously, my love,” Jon replied in a wry voice that said he wasn’t either.


End file.
